


Without Borders

by alexclusive



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe, Companion Piece, Gen, non-monster Ardyn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-10 11:09:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13500590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexclusive/pseuds/alexclusive
Summary: In a motel room of questionable quality a short distance from the border, Cor Leonis and the younger prince of Lucis share a mostly-sleepless night.A companion fic to Chapter 22 ofHigharollaKockamamie'sThe Temptation of Saint Anthony, but with This Guy.





	Without Borders

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HigharollaKockamamie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HigharollaKockamamie/gifts).



> Immense thanks to [HigharollaKockamamie](http://archiveofourown.org/users/HigharollaKockamamie/pseuds/HigharollaKockamamie) for graciously letting me play in her universe and gratuitously write spinoff fic of her absolutely delightful Weird Uncle Ardyn AU. As a quick refresher:
> 
> _Ardyn is Regis’ brother and not evil. Instead of being Trash Jesus he is Noctis’ weird but charming and scholarly uncle._
> 
> For best results, make sure to have read [Chapter 22 of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, but with This Guy](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11887434/chapters/30218931) first! The strict canonicity of this particular companion piece in that universe is questionable, but it sure was fun to write as a what-might-have-been.

They'd given him the worst room in the house: the one with tattered old floral curtains that only closed halfway and the motel sign in direct alignment with the window, so that there was next to no chance of sleeping with the orange-white neon throwing its too-bright glow all over the interior wall.

It hadn't been his first choice of motels, but by the same token, it probably wasn't anybody's first choice of motels. It wasn't that kind of place. Walk in and drop the word "reservation" and people would look at you like you'd grown a second head — now _that_ was more like it. The exterior walls were shabby. The parking lot asphalt was cracked in a thousand places and the parking space lines were faded off almost so bad as to be pointless for their purpose. It was the kind of place where you looked at it and just knew, without even seeing the interior, that the wallpaper in the lobby was probably peeling and discolored in places, and that somehow it'd feel smaller on the inside than it looked on the outside.

Still, beggars couldn't be choosers. It was a roof overhead and a door with a lock. Sometimes that's all it took, and tonight was one of those nights.

It got a little better when you started to consider the furnishings, though. It at least had a TV, even if it was a shabby one with only a handful of channels. There was fair-to-not-bad water pressure in the bathrooms. Not to mention the damn taps at least ran clear, once you managed to manhandle them on — more than you could say for some dumps out there, that was for sure. Bedspread was clean enough, too, for being one of those ugly standard-issue things that was always just a little too stiff and was spread across the mattress more to try to make it look palatable than to afford any real semblance of warmth beneath it.

Carpet was relatively unstained. He appreciated that a lot, given that he was currently stretched out on his back trying his damnedest to sleep on it.

That, like the motel, hadn't exactly been his first choice of circumstances. But it would've been too dangerous to grab a room with two beds — the last thing he'd wanted people to know when he'd paid for it was the fact that he wasn't planning to be alone tonight. It'd be the kind of thing that people remembered, one guy asking for a room equipped to house two. It'd make people wonder who else might be in there. It'd be unusual. Suspicious. 

You started to pick up on those kinds of things, once you'd been living this kind of life for a while. Noticing the sort of things that other people notice. Figuring out how to be unremarkable. Figuring out how to make even the most remarkable guy in the world blend in with the crowd — or at least, how to hide him well enough that nobody really knew he was there in the first place.

So. Two beds had been right out, which is why he'd gotten a room with only one. He'd set it all up alone, with his collar popped up high on his neck and one of Cid's stupid paisley bandanas rolled and tied around his forehead so people would think he was some kind of greasemonkey when he showed his face in public. It wasn't much, but it made for an okay cover, in a pinch. Maybe not the sort of thing he could keep up for hours at a stretch, but at least it made him look like a guy who might actually own Ardy's Vixen in the times when he was using the thing to get around, those times when he had to drive up to civilization where somebody might take a passing glance and remember her. Damned conspicuous, that old girl was, but Ardy loved her something fierce — and eyesore or not, he couldn't deny she'd gotten the two of them out of a pinch enough times that he couldn't help but be a little affectionate toward her, himself.

Not that he'd ever tell Ardy that. He'd never let him hear the end of it.

So as far as anybody knew, that's who was passing the night in room 215. Some punk motor jockey who'd blown into town with a flashy set of wheels and only stopped long enough to catch a little shut-eye before he'd be off with the wind once again. Nobody worth paying attention to. Nobody worth remembering.

Hiding in plain sight. The two of them really had a knack for that, sometimes.

In the dark, up and a little to his left, the mattress springs squeaked for about the eleventh time in the past ten minutes, which meant Ardy wasn't getting any more sleep up there than he was down here, at the moment. Not really surprising, considering. Still, he closed his eyes and started counting to ten, already ready and waiting for the opening overtures of a conversation to come along and shatter the silence.

Sure enough, it only took seven.

"I must say," came the soft, ragged murmur from up there in the darkness, "the topography of this mattress is terribly fascinating. Are you sure you wouldn't care to experience it for yourself?"

For a second, he thought about pretending to be asleep. Tempting, if he had any hopes of getting any _actual_ sleep tonight, instead of being up until dawn listening to Ardy's midnight ramblings. Maybe if he stayed quiet, Ardy would take a hint and just roll over himself.

Yeah. And maybe the Infernian wore tap shoes and gave dance lessons in Lestallum on Sundays.

"Not enough room for two," he opted to point out instead, for the third time since they'd checked in. "We've been over this."

"Are you insinuating that I am so grandiose as to take up more than my fair half of the bed?" came the reply, scraping in a way that sounded painful over half of the consonants.

"I'm insinuating it's the size of a shoebox," he answered. He arched his back, feeling the floorboards beneath the carpet dig into his shoulders as the motion pushed his spine into a new and sort of distantly painful alignment. Like it needed a crack, but he couldn't quite get far enough to reach it. "Will you go to sleep already?"

"My circadian rhythms are whimsical and capricious," Ardy said loftily. The sheets rustled, probably from him kicking his feet, or rolling over to peer over the side of the bed. He didn't know; he wasn't going to do him the dignity of tilting his head over that way to look. "Syncopated in nature, unconstrained by commonplace adherence to diurnal —"

"You're the only guy alive who says fifty words when one 'no' would do," he interrupted, only half paying attention because he'd gotten preoccupied with digging his heels into the carpet, trying to get a better arch to his back in the hopes of getting that cramped pressure out of it.

He realized his mistake when a silence settled down over the room. It took him a minute to figure out what it was, to retrace his steps and get back to the part where he'd said something he shouldn't, but it wasn't hard to catch it once he looked for it. It made him wince up into the darkness, once he had it, but by then the moment to take it back had long since passed. Too late to do anything about it now.

"Would it do, though?" Ardy said at last, at length. "Surely my verbosity is a gift unto this world that I would be remiss to squander. As I am, of course, alive to use it."

He rubbed a hand over his eyes. He could feel the carpet prickling at the nape of his neck. "Been hitting that word of the day calendar again, huh?"

"Bite your tongue. I would never augment my substantial and multifarious vocabulary with something so mundane."

"January fourteenth. _Multifarious_."

"That would be May tenth. January fourteenth is _Backpfeifengesicht_."

"Back-a-what?"

"A mostly-forgotten term from an archaic Duscaen dialect. It means 'a face badly in need of a fist'."

A beat passed. 

"That's a pretty long way of saying 'Drautos'," he said.

Up there in the darkness, he could hear Ardy snickering, which rapidly turned into a bout of raspy coughing that sounded like sandpaper dragging over rusty iron. It got a wince out of him again, and for a second he thought about pushing himself up and heading for the little bathroom to try and bring him back some water. Probably wouldn't do much good. Still, should he try? He probably should try, he decided.

Again, he waited too long. Slowly, the hacking tapered off, fading away into the quiet, and he lay as still as he could so that he could listen to all the little things going on up on the bed, all the little shuffles and quiet grunts. The little Ardy things. The normal Ardy things.

He listened to Ardy roll over wrong, or twist a little further than he should've, and knew the sharp hiss was coming before it ever hit his ears. It still hit him like a fist to the gut, anyway.

"Well. Here we are again," Ardy began slowly, moving around under the covers more gingerly this time, with slower movements and more subdued rustling. "Another grand adventure at last in its denouement. Do you recall the day you first agreed to join me on all of these clandestine endeavors of mine? It's been years now, yet I remember it as though it were just yesterday. Ah, my darling, to think you were but a lad then, green as the grass, wet behind the ears, a novice of —"

"Yeah, I remember," he interrupted, mostly to toss a wrench in Ardy's rhythm before he could really get going. "Not really like I could ever forget it. That was the worst day of my life."

"Cruel," Ardy clucked, in that way where you could tell he was just being flouncy and didn't really mean it.

He laughed a little, just one sharp exhale of breath. "No. Not because of that."

That got Ardy's attention. "Oh, no?" The springs in the mattress creaked. "What, then?"

He rubbed at his face again, sucking in a slow drag of air. "That was the same day they told me they weren't going to let me be your Shield. Remember?"

Up on the bed, he could hear Ardy hum, as his memory jogged. Memory was a funny thing, that way. Everybody remembered something different, even if they were all there for the same things. You remembered the things that were important to you. The things that dug knives into you.

Ardy was going to be remembering the sound of whip cracks for a long time, going forward.

"You'd gone to challenge Gilgamesh for that," Ardy reminisced quietly, which he knew was really an attempt at prompting him to talk. Guess his throat really must've been hurting, once he started thinking about it. Well, okay. He could talk. Not like there'd ever been much chance of him getting sleep tonight, anyway, with the floor this hard and the motel sign beaming in the window and his nerves all jangling from the tangible phantom memory of his prince falling into his arms.

"Yeah," he replied, and stared up at the shadows shifting around on the ceiling. "Figured if I could get his okay, they'd have to call me fit to protect you. Not really one of my brighter ideas."

"Surely you jest. Traveling alone to Taelpar Crag, determined to hurl your gauntlet of challenge in the face of a deadly legend and gain his approval purely for the sake of proving a point to a council of starched-shirt bureaucrats, and all at the tender age of just fifteen? That seems the height of sense and reason," Ardy answered dryly.

"Like you've got any room to talk about sense and reason."

"I am an expert in the lack thereof," Ardy answered. 

"No wonder we get along."

"Still," Ardy continued, as if he hadn't heard him, "You came back alive to boast of it, which is more than can be said of the Blademaster's other ill-fated challengers." The tone of his voice turned soft. "Even to this day, I'm frankly astonished that not one of the starched shirts thought that wasn't enough of an impossible feat to be considered a victory."

He let out another of those sharp breaths, a half-laugh. "Some victory. Lost my sword, got my ass kicked. They told me it went to somebody who had the temperament for it. Nice way of saying the guy they picked wasn't a reckless little bastard like me."

"Reckless, perhaps, yet still alive."

"Yeah. Still alive."

 _Just like you_ , he thought to himself. _Reckless, but still alive. You went and came back and you're still alive, too. We made it. It's okay now. We're okay._

"He made a terrible Shield, you know," Ardy murmured in his low rumbly voice, up there on the bed. "Their favored candidate. Steadfast, faithful, imposing. Skilled in all the martial fields and arts. Couldn't identify the lyrics to an Iron Oracle song if someone wrote them on a fish and slapped him in the face with it."

This time, the laugh that escaped him was real, not just one of those half-huffs. "You're not speaking from experience on that one, are you?"

"I will neither confirm nor deny."

"Poor bastard." He rolled his shoulders, trying again to get some of the kinks out of them. "That made him a terrible Shield?"

"Indisputably," Ardy said, without missing a beat. "How can I be expected to entrust the continuation of my very existence to a man incapable of appreciating the important things in life?"

"Yeah, well. Can't really hold that against him. It turns out they don't put that in the Crownsguard manuals."

"An oversight I shall have to remedy with all due speed," Ardy murmured. 

The room fell silent again. Ardy seemed to be thinking about something; he was shifting around again. Or maybe he was just trying to get more comfortable. Or maybe he just didn't feel safe on his stomach, with his back exposed save for those useless thin motel sheets.

Maybe it was all of the above. His voice betrayed as much, when he finally spoke again.

"I wanted you," came the whispered admission from the mattress. "I told His Majesty as much. Begged him to reconsider. Advocated on your behalf with a fire and a passion that would have made orators weep to behold."

"And he said no."

"I believe the official justification was that a conservative influence would be good for me."

It was almost enough to make him smile. _Conservative_. No wonder they'd driven each other crazy.

"The best-laid plans of mice and men," Ardy finished with a tone in his voice like a cat who'd gotten the cream. "But looking back on it now with the benefits of hindsight, I suppose in a way I'm glad they didn't allow you to become my Shield."

His brow furrowed in automatic displeasure. "Now who's cruel?"

"My dear lion, have I ever given any indication to the contrary?"

"Only all the times when you want something, and think acting like a sweetheart will get it for you."

"You do end up on the receiving end of a disproportionate number of my sweetheart moments," Ardy conceded. "And every one of them is wholeheartedly deserved."

He closed his eyes, mustering up every last bit of resilience he could, and swallowed hard in preparation for this conversation to go in directions that possibly he wasn't quite ready for. "So. You wanted me, but you didn't want me? You're gonna have to explain that one."

"It's not so complicated as you might think," Ardy murmured. "You would have made for a terrible Shield, yourself. Not for the same reasons as my present disappointment. But still, it's not a post that would have suited you, in the long run."

"Protecting you doesn't suit me? That's news to me."

"Not in that fashion," Ardy elaborated softly. "A shield, by nature, inhibits that which it protects. It creates a wall between danger and the protected. My poor unfortunate Shield and I have never gotten along, for that reason; he thinks I need him to stand between myself and certain peril, when in fact I have no desire whatsoever to be inhibited in my exploits."

He licked his lips, sucking in a slow breath. Ardy always had a knack for saying things that made no sense, and then turning them around so that they ended up sounding like they made all the sense in the world. 

"So what does that make me, then?" he asked.

Ardy went _hmm_ , which was always a sign that he was about to say something stupid and poetic and sentimental. "My tether," he said at last. "To ensure that no matter how far gone I might be, there is always something that might yet pull me back from the precipice."

The sound of his voice on the phone had been shaken, splintering like fractured windshield glass. He'd had the presence of mind to use the codewords, but not much else. The rendezvous they'd set up had sounded less like agreeing and more just like begging.

He'd fallen into his arms, and for a second there, he'd really thought he was going to see the prince of Lucis cry for the very first time.

"Sounds about right," he said at last, and thought about it — about the conversation, the reminiscing, about Ardy's insistence on talking even when his throat had to be shot all to shit from the screaming, about how the banter bouncing between them was filling the room with memories instead of silence, about how he'd warped in through the window so that only one of them would be seen letting himself in through the door and looked at the way the neon light chased away half the darkness with its glow and colored the moonlight orange, and all he'd had to say when he'd seen it was _oh_.

He'd been alone, all that time. Must've spent at least part of it thinking about dying. Dying alone. Alone, on the wrong side of the border, an insulting handful of miles from where safety was waiting for him, eating some damn diner sandwich and sitting oblivious to what was happening. Beaten. Interrogated. Left for dead. Alone.

Absurd, to endure something like that and still say he didn't need a shield. That someone shouldn't have been with him. That someone shouldn't have put a wall between him and that.

But Ardy didn't want a shield. Didn't want to be protected in a way that held him back. All he really needed was to know that when things got bad, and he got lost —

( _My tether_ , he'd said. _To pull me back from the precipice._ )

— that there was still somebody out there who'd be there to make sure he got back home.

He rolled onto his side, pushing himself up on one elbow. "Hey," he said.

"Mm?" came the response from the bed.

"Move over. Guess maybe I'll give the topography a try, after all," he replied, and shuffled up onto the tiny sliver of mattress that Ardy had left room for him on.

It wasn't all that much more comfortable than the floor, all things considered. Not with the springs poking awkwardly into his back. Not with Ardy stealing more than half the covers all to himself, the bastard.

It didn't surprise him, either, when halfway through the night a half-asleep Ardy woke him up by crawling into his arms, shivering all over for reasons that had nothing to do with the cold.

He let him.

"I've got you, Ardy," he said softly, and tucked his prince's shock of stupid red-purple hair beneath his chin, and let him stay like that all the way until dawn.

**Author's Note:**

> Once again, massive thanks to [HigharollaKockamamie](http://archiveofourown.org/users/HigharollaKockamamie/pseuds/HigharollaKockamamie), not only for letting me dabble around in her AU but for tolerating my incessant yelling about Cor Leonis, which I have no intention of ceasing anytime soon. Any and all feedback is appreciated, and thank you very much for reading!


End file.
